Smartphones - SlashGear

Posts Tagged ‘smartphones’

iPhone APIs allow data harvesting on unmodded handsets warns developer

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

spyphone app iPhone security is a hot topic, and so when a developer takes to the stage to describe how rogue applications could “harvest personal data” on an unmodified iPhone without a user realising, you know there’s going to be some coverage. Nicolas Seriot gave a talk about iPhone Privacy in Geneva this week, and listed several ways [pdf link] in which Apple’s own APIs could be used to read or edit the address book, browse Safari and YouTube history, recent GPS position and more.

Seriot has put together an app – SpyPhone – that demonstrates what data is available merely through the standard APIs, and at first glance it’s eye-watering stuff. While passwords are blanked out, there’s a keyboard cache that logs every other word typed on the iPhone (it’s used in autocompletion). However, as the commenters at Slashdot have been discussing, security on the Apple smartphone is not just a case of on-device safeguards.

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Verizon OTA fix coming to address DROID photography woes

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

The Motorola DROID's bizarre date-related camera bug will apparently be addressed "within the coming weeks" according to Verizon, who are promising an over-the-air (OTA) firmware update that will prevent the cyclical "bad autofocus" issue from reoccurring. The new software will also improve voice call quality, something the DROID didn't have too much difficulty with in the first place.

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ZiiLABS TRINITY smartphone gets video demo

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

ZiiLABS’ TRINITY is designed to draw the attention of smartphone lovers to the ZMS-05 platform, just like its ZiiEGG predecessor did for PMPs, and it seems to be doing a pretty good job. Crave Asia grabbed some hands-on time with the smartphone – which is capable of 1080p HD video playback, has a 3.1-inch 800 x 480 OLED capacitive touchscreen and triband WCDMA/HSDPA connectivity – and came away reasonably impressed.

creative zii trinity

Video hands-on after the cut

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Nokia to halve 2010 smartphone range, make cheaper S60 phones

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

Nokia’s plans for the coming year have slowly been filtering out of the company’s Capital Markets event earlier this week, and while they’re predicting significant growth in the use of both Maemo and S60, they’re also cutting back on sheer number of models. Citing “unnecessary differentiation” that could potentially confuse customers, Nokia plans to halve their smartphone range in 2010 according to Antti Vasara, head of smartphones R&D at the firm.

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Nokia E72 shipping in USA for $469

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

Anticipation for the Nokia E72 belies the suggestion that there are no S60 enthusiasts left; the new QWERTY smartphone has a quiet but devoted following who have been anxiously tracking Nokia’s online store. Now the E72 has finally begun shipping in the US, priced at $469.

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China Unicom XT701 rumored to be another Motorola Sholes sighting

By Chris Davies on Friday, Dec 4th 2009 No Comments

From a (fake) Motorola to another supposed Android Motorola handset. According to Androidin this is the China Unicom XT701, made by Motorola and similar in design to what we’re expecting the Sholes to look like. They’re saying the handset has a 3.7-inch touchscreen, no hardware keyboard, Android 2.1 and a 5-megapixel camera, a few megapixels down on the 8MP shooter we’ve heard will be on the Sholes.

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Motorola invest in Sensitive Object acoustic touchscreen specialists

By Chris Davies on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2009 No Comments

Motorola have invested in a French startup that uses acoustic feedback to mimic traditional touch and multitouch input. Sensitive Object use acoustics in their ReverSys system to "analyze sound waves departing from the point of a touch to precisely and cost-effectively transform any product into a touch device." For example, the system could track points of contact across the entire body of a cellphone, without requiring expensive capacitive sensors to cover the device.

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Nokia 2010 Symbian UI update gets previewed

By Chris Davies on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2009 2 Comments

Nokia’s promise to overhaul the Symbian UI yesterday was heavy on stats but light on screenshots, but thankfully the company’s webcast is fair overflowing with concept renders. The Finnish company has promised not only to make the UI more attractive – by cutting out clutter and upping scrolling rates from 15fps to 60fps – but more functional too, slicing out the number of taps required to complete tasks or launch features, and giving users “large capacitive displays” to do that tapping on.

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HTC Touch.B based on Qualcomm BREW platform [Video]

By Chris Davies on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2009 No Comments

Remember the HTC Touch.B (aka HTC Rome), spotted in the wild earlier this week? The handset was tipped to run Android initially, but MobiFrance have now revealed that in fact it’s HTC’s first Qualcomm Brew device. Rumored to be arriving in early 2010, the Brew smartphone will be HTC’s entry-level device; there’s a brief video demo of it in action after the cut.

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Video demo after the cut

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HTC Android device codenames unearthed in leaked ROM

By Chris Davies on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2009 No Comments

htc android logo The neat thing about leaked ROMs is that often there are tidbits about upcoming devices to be discovered among the tweaked functionality. Supposedly buried in the recent Hero Android 2.1 ROM from HTC is a long string of device codenames, some of which – like the Hero and Dream – we’ve seen already, but many of which are new or, until now, merely rumored.